Inelegant words just the surface

The British have a habit of driving home the obvious in an understated way.

London Mayor Boris Johnson did just that earlier this year when he dismissed Mitt Romney’s questioning of his city’s preparedness to host and generate interest in the Olympic Games.

“There is a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we are ready,” the mayor said back then to a raucous concert crowd of some 60,000 Olympic supporters.

At the time, Mr. Romney was making his first trip abroad as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

But in his “there is a guy called Mitt Romney” line, the London mayor summed up what the Democratic presidential campaign has thus far spent more than $200 million in TV ads to suggest, and what the Republican presidential campaign likewise has spent more than $300 million to hide — that Mitt Romney is no statesman.

He might be the best at squeezing profits out of a dying economy, but when it comes to the business of government, he is dangerously unversed in the principles or the art of governing.

And maddeningly he believes his failure to project otherwise is a matter of him being inelegant, rather than being hollow at his core.

That was his explanation in trying to calm the latest angst he created among his supporters with a speech he gave at a $50,000-a-person fundraiser that was surreptitiously recorded and posted on the Internet.

In the speech, Mr. Romney dismissed nearly half the electorate as people who are “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them … who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it …”

Those people, who he said will vote for President Obama “no matter what,” pay no income taxes, he concluded.

“My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

He later told reporters that his remarks were “not elegantly stated,” and that he was sure he could “state it more clearly in a more effective way.”

But he was clearly and once again wrong on the facts, if not on the vision, needed to move the country forward.

While 46.4 percent of households pay no federal income tax, approximately two-thirds of this group pays payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Of the 18.1 percent that doesn’t pay payroll taxes, more than half (10.3 percent) are the elderly, while 6.9 percent are people with income under $20,000. The elderly, of course, have traditionally voted in the majority for Republican presidential candidates.

Meanwhile, Mr. Romney’s misguided domestic governing bifurcation appears to extend to foreign policy, because in that same speech he opined that the Middle East peace process will remain unsolved and that the best approach would be to “sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

It should be perplexing that a would-be American president’s vision for the 21st Century is to run on a platform that abandons half the electorate in this country and the peace process in the Middle East.

It should be abundantly clear by now that lacking his own core convictions in how to shape policies to preserve and extend America’s greatness, Mr. Romney is a man who will be eternally vulnerable to the warped ideology of those he parrots.

It should be clear he is not a man worthy of the title of American Republican presidential nominee.